Last February, in Mae Sot, Thailand, a transit point on the border with Burma, I met a Burmese man named Bo Kyi. He had smoker’s breath and bad teeth from chain-smoking cheroots, and he spoke passable English. His flat gaze gave very little away. Bo Kyi had been a political prisoner in Burma for many years. After his release, he had fled the country. In Mae Sot, he founded an organization called Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma. His outfit occupied a small house on an obscure sidestreet—even in Thailand, dissidents aren’t safe from the reach of Burmese intelligence. In the front yard a wall was covered with black-and-white photographs—they looked like mug shots—of political prisoners in Burma, along with their length of sentence. Some of them had dates of death.
Bo Kyi was the sort of ordinary-looking man you meet in places like the on Thai-Burmese border. In a group of twenty you wouldn’t pick him out as the hero. Last Thursday, I ran into him again, at the Natural History Museum, in New York, where Human Rights Watch was holding its annual dinner. It was one of those slightly embarrassing occasions where the well-to-do, entirely safe and secure guests dress up and drink and make small talk before sitting down to pay their respects to people living in very different circumstances.
Bo Kyi was one of Human Rights Watch’s two honorees (the other was a journalist from Uzbekistan named Umida Niazova). I am reprinting his remarks, because they moved me, and because they help explain what motivates people like him:
(Photograph: Ash’aman, CC, BY-NC-SA)